


Strife With Me, Goddammit

by Newtavore



Series: Fragility [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fighting Kink, Fights, Fluff, M/M, Minor Injuries, Minor Violence, Protectiveness, STRIFE!, but kankri will not stand for that shit, karkat gets randy when kankri brings out the weapons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-14 05:29:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1254691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Newtavore/pseuds/Newtavore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat thinks you're weak, does he? Thinks you can't protect yourself? Well, you're going to prove him wrong. Thoroughly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strife With Me, Goddammit

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote half of this at 6am don't judge me

You think you’ve developed a rather unhealthy habit.

 

Every night after you’ve pailed, you spend a good fifteen minutes checking Kankri over for injuries, asking if he’s hurt, if he’s okay. You know it annoys him, but you can’t help it. You’re too strong, with too little self control and not enough restraint. You know you hurt him sometimes, without meaning to, but he never says anything, so you have to find out yourself. 

 

 You wake him up in the mornings with soft kisses and a “How do you feel?”. You take every bruise, every scratch, as a mortal injury, and treat it as such. You baby him, you know that, but you can’t seem to stop. He’s just so breakable, it scares you every time you grab him a little too hard, or treat him a little too rough. 

 

Your hands shake with restraint every time you touch him, and you know he knows, but you can’t stop. 

 

Like now. You knew you were being too rough the night before, but at the time, everything was a  _little_  hard to focus on, on account of you being bulge-fucking-deep in Kankri’s nook. Thinking hadn’t really been high up on your list of acceptable activities while pailing, then. Now you were regretting it, because you’d clutched him tight, held him close to you, hands around his waist, and because of that, he has dark, finger shaped bruises wrapped around his middle, under his ribcage. 

 

He hisses when you touch them, and for a moment you panic, terror-stricken as you fret about possible internal injuries. He has a matching ring of bruises around one bicep, handprints and scratches on his hips, and you can see how sore he is from his awkward, stilted movements. 

 

You  _hate_  yourself. 

 

You  _hate_  yourself for hurting him, hate yourself for being so stupid as to lose yourself while holding him, while fucking him. You caused him to hurt, you bruised him, marked him up, it’s your fault. No blaming shitty past selves, no shucking off responsibility this time- it was you.  _You_  did this. 

 

You wonder if this is how Equius feels, all the time. 

 

 You are silent as you clean him up, ever so gently, despite his garrulous efforts to assure you he’s fine. He isn’t fine, you aren’t fine  _this isn’t fine_ \- it looks like you fucking  _beat_  him, how doesn’t he see this as a  _fucking problem_? 

 

"Karkat," he says, touching your face, trying to pull you to him, but you won’t, _can’t_  get close to him, not right now, “Karkat, it’s alright, I’m fine, look, I’m okay. You didn’t hurt me. I bruise easily, you know that. It looks so much worse than it is, I swear. Please don’t blame yourself for this, you didn’t do anything-“

 

You shut him up with a kiss, chaste, nothing more than a brush of lips but it does the job. He falls silent and just looks at you, blank eyes crinkled in distress. 

 

"I hurt you," you finally say, almost-touching the bruise ringing his arm, trembling fingertips held less than an inch away from damaged flesh, "I fucking hurt you, look at yourself Kankri you are not fucking fine and I did this to you, I… fuck, you’re so fragile, I shouldn’t even be allowed to touch you, you’re too breakable and all I do is break things-"

 

“ _Fragile_?”

 

And now you’ve made him upset. He’s doing the thing, poofing up his imaginary feathers and wriggling as if sinking himself into the ground, not to be budged. 

 

"Karkat, you are  _greatly_  underestimating me and under different circumstances, I might consider this  _triggering_. I am not as…  _delicate_  as you seem to think I am, and I am perfectly capable of both taking care of and defending myself. I am bruised, yes, but I have a bruise on my leg from when I dropped a book on my calf. Karkat, I would probably bruise if a  _butterfly_  landed on me. This is not a rare event.”

 

He takes your face in his hands and forces you to look at him. Well, you don’t really resist, so there’s not much forcing actually going on, but whatever. 

 

"I am _fine_. You did not harm me beyond repair- I hardly consider this harm at all, to be honest. You don’t need to be so worried about hurting me all the time, love. I am not as weak as I appear."

 

"But you are!" you blurt out, hands hovering over his shoulders, "You are! You’re so fucking  _breakable_ , I could snap you  _in-fucking-half_  without even _thinking_ about it, do you understand? You’re just… you’re so…”

 

His expression turns to steel, a dark glare you’ve never seen before stealing across his face as he pulls away from you. 

 

"Fine. If you see me as  _so weak_ , I suppose I shall have to confute your beliefs. Strife with me.”

 

You can’t think of anything to say for a full minute. You must have misheard, he said something else, right? You couldn’t have heard those words fall from Kankri’s lips, not tame, passive Kankri. 

 

"Strife with me, goddammit," he hisses, pulling you to your feet, and your gut drops down to your feet when you realize he’s  _serious_ , he actually wants to  _fight_ with you. 

 

"No! No-  _no fucking way_ -“

 

"You act as if you have a choice in the matter."

 

He drags you out of the room, out of the hive, and onto the lawn ring in front of it. You aren’t sure how- the treads of your shoes suddenly don’t seem to stick to anything, so you slide across the floor as you try to dig your heels in. He’s this relentless force, irresistible, physically tossing you outside and onto the ground. 

 

"We are going to strife, and I am going to prove to you how much of a weak, delicate flower I am actually  _not_. Do not deny me this, Karkat, or I will be absolutely furious.”

 

 He glares down at you, his extra height and tangled poof of black hair suddenly making him seem… actually _intimidating_. And then he smirks. He fucking  _smirks_ , and you know you’re fucked. Whatever comes out of his mouth next will fuck you up. 

 

"I went thousands of sweeps without a pail, but I doubt you have the same restraint."

 

Fuck. Fuck you don’t want to do this, you don’t want to hurt him, but you know he’s fucking serious and goddammit you do not want to go back to a life of grudgingly tolerated celibacy. Plus, you really, really don’t want him angry with you, because when he’s angry with you, he doesn’t speak. He just stares. Stares and stares and stares until you do anything, literally anything, to just get him to talk with you again. 

 

Ironic. 

 

So you sigh, and pull yourself to your feet, preparing yourself for an exercise in extreme control, because you will not hurt him. 

 

"Arm yourself," he spits, and fuck, he’s angry. He’s mad as a fucking subjugglator, and all of that anger is directed at you. You are not getting out of this- there is no talking Kankri down when he is this angry, and once he gets an idea in his head in this state, there is nothing you can do to discourage him.

 

You hesitate, but equip your weakest set of sickles, the practice set with the dulled blades. You don’t know what kind of weapon he uses- something small, you imagine, small and defensive and oh god this is a terrible fucking idea-

 

He pulls out a motherfucking  _scythe_. 

 

The thing is almost six inches taller than he is, and pitch black, the only color coming from a mutant-red jewel centered at the top of the blade. It’s relatively simple, with few embellishments, and utterly terrifying to look at. 

 

And then he charges forward. 

 

You weren’t expecting him to be so fucking _fast_. The thought races through your mind as you throw yourself to the side, barely dodging the long, curved blade. 

 

“ _Do not treat me like an inferior_!” Kankri snarls, swinging the scythe with expert precision only mastered by years and years of practice, “I will not be  _coddled_ , do you hear me! You will  _fight_ , Karkat, and you will do it  _seriously_!”

 

You block the next attack with your sickles and jump back, trying to form some sort of strategy. You assume, based on his personality, that Kankri would be a textbook fighter, calculable, predictable, but you couldn’t be more fucking wrong. He’s all over the place, putting his lithe frame to good use, and you’re hard pressed to keep up with him. 

 

You’re stronger, more muscular, and if it came down to a brawl you would have him down and out with no problem, but Kankri is faster, more flexible, and apparently capable of some pretty impressive acrobatics. He whips the blade around almost too fast to see, and almost takes your head off twice before you throw yourself into the fight full throttle. 

 

Kankri didn’t want to be coddled? Then you weren’t gonna fucking coddle him. 

 

You dart forward, under his swinging blade, and swipe at his stomach. The little fucker flips over you. Literally jumps in the air and flips over you, and to add insult to injury, he swings his own blade down while he’s upside down in  _mid-fucking-air_  and taps your back, light as you please despite the force he’d swung with. 

 

"First strike," he pants, landing lightly on his feet before turning to face you. 

 

You want to punch him in the face. With your fist and maybe also your mouth. 

 

You both stand stock still for a full minute, just staring at each other, but then you move. And when you say move, you mean you both fucking  _moved_. 

 

You have no idea how the little fucker is so fast, but you can barely keep up. It’s all you can do to match your sickles to his scythe, blocking and dodging. He’s on full offensive, whirling his blade around like it’s lighter than air, performing tricks your eyes can’t keep up with and being generally impossible to hit. 

 

Every second you’re matched in combat, your admittedly low estimations of his fighting ability rises. 

 

By the time he’d gracefully fallen into a backbend to dodge a swipe of your sickle, then kicked up and almost broke your nose, they were sky high. 

 

You were never going to make fun of his daily weird yoga stretching ever again, if that was the reason he could literally fold himself in half in order to avoid getting  _cut_  in half. 

 

You fight- deceptively, evenly matched- for almost five minutes before you slip up, falling for a feint and ending up with the curved blade an inch from your neck. 

 

Kankri smirks, taps the blade ever so carefully against the terrifyingly vulnerable piece of anatomy, and says, “Second strike.”

 

You work yourself into a frenzy, and the pace of the battle becomes even faster. You score one hit, barely, by rolling back in a dodge and sliding across the floor to swipe at his exposed thigh, but it’s one hit out of two and he has you on the defensive again. 

 

You think you have him trapped, sickle raised to catch his shoulder, but then he does something so fucking outrageous you would have never seen it coming in a billion sweeps- he jumps up. 

 

He jumps up, brushes your blade out of the way with a swing of his own, plants a foot against your chest and uses you as a springboard. You thought that was only a thing that could work in shitty cartoons, but no- his body weight is so negligent that you barely sway with the motion, and he launches himself up and over you, spinning the blade in the air to tap against your side. 

 

Wen he lands, his blade is resting against your ribs, the curved point settled right over your heart. 

 

"Third strike."

 

Now that you’ve come to a stop, you notice that he’s shaking, trembling with exhaustion and exertion, and he can hardly breathe, but he’s smirking. Smirking at _you_. He kicked your ass, and he knows it, and he is never going to let you forget it. 

 

You drop your weapons to the ground, signaling your official defeat. He pulls away, swinging his scythe around with a practiced, acrobatic swirl before planting the pole on the floor, leaning against it heavily. 

 

"Do you still think I’m weak," he asks quietly, staring at you. The quivering of his limbs and the harshness of his breathing do nothing to hide the intensity of his eyes, the hard, level quality of his voice.

 

"No," you say, speaking the truth. 

 

You don’t think he’s weak- you never really did, you just didn’t think he was  _strong_. But now? You’ve been corrected. The tingle of your flesh where his blade rested not one minute ago was testament to how  _soundly_  you’d been corrected. He had taken all of your preconceived notions of him and set them on fire before throwing them out the window. 

 

"I can handle you, Karkat. I can handle anything you throw at me. I am not some brittle, flimsy little _damsel_  that needs  _protecting_  at all hours of day and night. I have taken care of myself for  _thousands of sweeps_  before you arrived, and I shall continue to take care of myself for as long as these bubbles exist.”

 

He takes a few wobbly steps in your direction, using his scythe as a crutch, before reaching out ant touching your face with gentle fingers. 

 

"I care about you so much, Karkat, and I appreciate that you want to keep me safe. It means so much to me that you worry, that you care, but you have to recognize that I am capable of keeping myself in one piece, alright? You don’t have to protect me from every single thing, and you especially don’t have to protect me from yourself."

 

You lean forward and gather him into a hug, pressing your face tightly to his heaving chest, hearing the wild beating of his heart in your ears. He’s still trembling, but you can feel him calm down bit by bit, regaining his breath and recovering from the intense physical activity. 

 

"If you do something I do not like, I will tell you. If you hurt me beyond what I am capable of dealing with, I will tell you. If you make me uncomfortable in any way,  _I will tell you_. You have to trust me as much as I trust you, Karkat, or else this isn’t going to work. You have to trust that I am capable of watching out for myself, that I know my limits and that I can recognize when enough is enough.”

 

You nod, and he tilts your head up to meet his blank eyes, gracing you with a soft smile. 

 

"Now that I’ve thoroughly schooled you, can we go back to normal?"

 

"Yes," you choke out, and catch his mouth in a kiss. 

 

He’s right, you think, molding your body to his as he parts his lips, he’s so right, you have to trust him to know his own limits. You know you’ve been acting irrationally, but it was so hard to see him as capable of defending himself. Now you had no problems in that department, because he just spent the last half hour meticulously whipping your ass. 

 

Kankri, delicate, frail Kankri, Kankri who weighed no more than 115 pounds soaking wet, Kankri who you could pick up and throw with ease, Kankri who looked no more threatening than a kitten, had beat your ass so exhaustively that there was no denying exactly how capable he was.

 

And god _damn_  if that wasn’t attractive. 

**Author's Note:**

> so yeah this goes after fragility and the other thing and i just really need some more kankri/karkat alright? Also, if anyone wants some rare m/m pairings feel free to tell me and i'll see how much caffeine/sugar i need to write it.


End file.
